Description

The Japanese Folk Art movement of the 1920s and 1930s promoted the preservation and appreciation of craft traditions. Stenciling, a technique long associated with creating fabric designs for kimonos, gained new respect from printmakers who used it for the first time to produce purely artistic images. Although Mori spent much of his career creating textiles, in the late 1950s he began to use the stencil technique to produce fine-art prints. His inventive images-based on subjects from the Kabuki theater, Japanese festivals, and traditional folktales-became wildly popular both in and outside of Japan.